Pages

Saturday

Apple Robots - But Not What You Think

In the state of Washington, the robots are coming - to help pick apples. According to this AP story,
the majority of the current apple picking workers are illegal aliens,
and because our government has now decided to pay attention to the
"illegal" part, there is a growing shortage of human pickers.

Apparently, Americans don't like to pick apples, which is undoubtedly hard physical work.

"Human
pickers are getting scarce," said Gad Kober, a co-founder of
Israel-based FFRobotics. "Young people do not want to work in farms, and
elderly pickers are slowly retiring."

Two
companies, FFRobotics
and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, California, are moving to get their
robot pickers into the orchards as soon as possible.